The 6 Best Books to Read This October

From Whitney Cummings' raunchy memoir to Ta-Nehisi Coates' history of the Obama era.

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By
Lisa Shea

Oct 23, 2017

Now that fall's here, you'll need some books to snuggle up with in a cozy nook (or, let's just be honest, bed). From a completist's collection of Joni Mitchell writings to Ellen Pao's account of her groundbreaking workplace fight against discrimination, here are the six books to add to your shelf this month.

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Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe

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Joni Mitchell fans, you’re in for a good month. Legendary music critic and archivist Barney Hoskyns’s Joni: The Anthology (Picador) is a comprehensive, sensitive compilation of profiles, interviews, and concert reviews from Mitchell’s nearly 50-year career. Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (Sarah Crichton Books), by David Yaffe, is an intimate bio of Mitchell, who cooperated with the author, and includes interviews with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, and more. “I did love, to the best of my ability, and sometimes, for a while, it was reciprocated,” Mitchell says of the theme of heartbreak in her songs. “And sometimes the person was too far gone on drugs or whatever…they were incapable.”

Fans of 2 Broke Girls can switch off their devices and read this funny, raunchy, feminist memoir from comic, actress, writer, and director Whitney Cummings. A moment from I'm Fine...and Other Lies (Putnam): “Why do I have to freeze my eggs when guys can have kids well into their sixties? I was so outraged by the biological injustice that I refused to make the appointment for two years. I made childish proclamations to justify my stubbornness.… ‘I’ll just adopt. So many kids need homes. At this point, having your own kid is basically like buying a dog from a breeder.’”

The title of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book of essays, some of which you may know (“Fear of a Black President”; “The Case for Reparations”) and some of them new, comes from the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians and intellectuals in the late 1800s as white supremacists gained control of the South. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (One World) is a history of the Obama era, a time that now seems so far away.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (One World), amazon.com

Ellen Pao, the tech exec who—gasp—sued her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, for sexual discrimination, lost her suit. But in going public, she prompted a massive discussion, including confessions from other women with experiences similar to hers and corporate soul-searching about sexism in Silicon Valley. Her book about what really happened, Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change (Spiegel & Grau), gets down and dirty about the culture she was in, but also the loneliness of being a woman in her field: “I found the number of things I was ‘supposed to be’ extremely daunting. As one of the only women or people of color in a workplace, you’re trying to do so many things at once.… You’re trying to be fun so they like you. You want to be humble, but you want to be confident. No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t figure out a way to succeed.”

Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump by Allen Frances

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From the guy who literally wrote the book (as in the DSM) on mental health disorders comes Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump (William Morrow). Allen Frances, MD, a renowned clinician who in February scolded other mental health professionals for publicly diagnosing Donald Trump with narcissistic personality disorder (they’re not supposed to do that kind of thing), is now scolding us for our selfishness, our denial, and our wishful thinking at the expense of our children’s, country’s, and planet’s future. We’ve brought this president upon ourselves, he writes. Trump is sort of a plot point in our existential survival: His presence will either spur us to reform ourselves and our society—or it’ll speed along our demise. Part political rant (“Trump, Tribalism, and the Attack on Democracy” is one chapter title), part self-help (“Why We Make Such Bad Decisions” is another), this is an unusual and important book about our responsibility for the mess we’re in.

Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump (William Morrow), amazon.com

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